Last Thursday, the Navy awarded a new contract to five intelligence, computer and security companies to provide both hardware and “the development, integration, and test of intelligence, battlespace awareness, and information operations applications”.

In other words, the US Navy is embarking on a major new project in the area of surveillance, technology and data acquisition to provide military commanders with a detailed understanding of any conflict area.

According to the Department of Defense’s own definition “battlespace awareness” includes an area’s “environment, factors, and conditions”, “the status of friendly and adversary forces, neutrals and noncombatants” and “weather and terrain.”

The addition of “information operations” in the contract suggests the project will go beyond the remit of geospatial intelligence and may have some capability for commanders to organise messaging campaigns in an attempt to influence various actors in an area of operations.

The contract raises questions over exactly what information the US Navy is intending to collect and in which conflict areas.

The investment can be understood in the context of the influence of ‘network-centric warfare‘ on US military thinking which emphasises the value of a digitally connected force as a means of improving situational awareness and military decisions.

A press release earlier in the year from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) calling for ‘big data’ projects noted that:

“the demands for actionable information have spiked as warfighters at every level—whether at the planning table or on patrol—are called upon to make well-informed decisions”.

The battlespace awareness contract was awarded by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center and will initially last until August 2013. The US Navy has options in the contract to extend the work to 2017.

The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center reports directly to the Navy’s Information Dominance Systems Command.

Data is the future, if it’s not already the present.

A couple of days ago, I finished a post on Wikileaks by stating that the media organisation that refuses to play by everybody else’s rules is still learning its own game. I promised you more on that and here it is.

One of the reasons Wikileaks has attracted such a strong reaction from the Pentagon and others is precisely because it doesn’t play by a variety of media ‘rules’.

Far more subtle pressure can be placed on traditional media organisations, which have obvious offices with a registered address under a specific legal jurisdiction, journalists and editors who are easily contactable, and established guidelines and working practices (however praiseworthy or dubious).

Wikileaks, with just a four year publishing history, is much more of an unknown quantity spread across the globe to avoid legal censure.  Its servers are apparently safely stored in a Cold War nuclear bunker in Sweden and it has been pressing the Icelandic government to create a legal environment that will protect whistleblowers.

Operating in a grey area somewhere between the spheres of media and activism, Wikileaks is also capitalising on a window of opportunity. The organisation’s ability to consistently publish secret documents is based on the vulnerability of institutional record-keeping to the potential for individuals to transmit vast quantities of digital information with relative ease.

The bureaucratic organisations that Wikileaks seeks to expose have failed to address a number of the weaknesses made possible by the digital era. Existing governmental controls are demonstrably inadequate.

The point was rammed home at the Frontline Club on Monday by Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, when he discussed the Pentagon’s attempts to frame Wikileaks’ actions as a breach of the U.S. Espionage Act.

In order to do so, the U.S. military demanded that Wikileaks “return” documents as though they were bits of paper.

Assange described a light-hearted conversation in a Wikileaks office in which the team wondered if they could fulfil that demand simply by sending the Pentagon an email with the documents attached.

While one might hope that Wikileaks would force the powerful to be more transparent and accountable, a clampdown by the Pentagon is probably more likely.

Procedural changes at the Pentagon are inevitable, pressure for legal reform is not unlikely and perhaps they’ll even be learning from Wikileaks – an organisation that seems to know a thing or two about information security and secrecy.

In the meantime, Wikileaks will be kept under pressure. An alleged source of the Afghan war log leaks, Bradley Manning, has been made into a high profile scapegoat and Assange described the last three months as the most difficult for Wikileaks since the organisation began.

Wikileaks

"The Afghan War Diary [is] an extraordinary secret compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports describe the majority of lethal military actions involving the United States military.

"We hope its release will lead to a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan and provide the raw ingredients necessary to change its course."

The Guardian

"A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency."

Watch the Guardian’s live blog for further developments. Includes a link to a video interview with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

New York Times

"The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders." 

Der Spiegel

"The war logs expose the true scale of the Western military deployment — and the problems beleaguering Germany’s Bundeswehr in the Hindu Kush."

U.S. Response

Statement by National Security Advisor General James Jones:

"The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security…These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people."

Reaction from Pakistan

Telegraph report including comments from Pakistan envoy:

"Ambassador Husain Haqqani called the release of the file by web whistleblower site Wikileaks "irresponsible," saying it consisted of "unprocessed" reports from the field.

""The documents circulated by Wikileaks do not reflect the current onground realities," Mr Haqqani said in a statement."

Taliban Tactics

Journalist David Axe looks at an incident from June 2007.

Nothing New?

Kings of War

"So, do these documents tell us something intrinsically new? No.

"But they do provide a mine of rich empirical detail, which will allow campaigners and even enterprising scholars interested in this area to w[e]ave narratives about war-fighting and the civilian experience of war.

"Where the documents show the coalition to have been ‘naive’ (the word the BBC kept using), it might prove to be an opportunity or a point of departure for learning lessons. One would hope that it doesn’t take the repeated actions of this campaigning website to prompt it; and one also has to hope that they haven’t done more harm than good."

Abu Muqawama

"Scoop!"

Wikileaks and the media

"Wikileaks takes new approach in latest release of documents", Washington Post.

"The interaction between "traditional" and "new" media is the most immediately arresting "process" aspect of this event," James Fallows, The Atlantic.

Jay Rosen, Press Think, The "first stateless news organisation"

David Clinch: "The leak itself is the headline"

"Story behind biggest leak in intelligence history", Nick Davies, The Guardian.

Of course, long gone are the days when blogs were an unknown quantity, and these days blogs by U.S. soldiers will usually be signed off by a superior meaning they are to some degree ‘official’ but I wasn’t after these individual soldier blogs.

By ‘official’ I meant blogs that were started as deliberate public affairs exercises on behalf of a branch of the services, or individual units as the corporate, the professional, the governmental, the NGO and the military began colonising the blogosphere.

Nobody seemed sure but people like @LindyKyzer, @fieldsteven, @salottimc and @milblogging (who also wrote a blog post about it) pointed me in the direction of various pieces of information or other people I might ask.

Using their information and some link-hopping, what appears below is a list by start of date of official U.S. military blogs.

I have no doubt that it is a far from comprehensive list so if you have any to add or reckon I’ve got the date wrong let me know. I’m aware that some blogs might have been disbanded or restarted.

I’m not sure I can yet conclusively answer the question I posed but I’m further forward.

It has been an interesting exercise. For some reason (and I’m not sure why) I was under the impression that the U.S. military had been officially blogging for longer than it actually has. 

Initially the strategy of the Department of Defense’s New Media Directorate, set up in October 2006, was to work with and engage bloggers rather than start their own blogs.  

(Although @Wodins suggested that official military blogging might have been taking place on ARPANET way before the Internet.)

Official U.S. Military Blogs by Start Date

2004-5 

DoD news article suggests a blog written by Capt Steve Alvarez for Orlando Sentinel as part of his official duties in Iraq was "first official U.S. military blog". (Here is a taster…it appears to be no different from any online article).

2006

October – Department of Defense New Media Directorate established; For the Record (Pseudo-blog: see this written by Steven Field for discussion of whether this is a blog)*

2007

October – Bloggers’ Roundtable

2008

Updates: This post has been updated on several occasions to include several other blogs missing from the original post in response to comments and emails.

Various people (including U.S. senators) and organisations (like the European Commission) have already pointed out that this has serious implications.

Here is another.

On Monday 17 May, a twenty year old US soldier was killed in Afghanistan. Billy Anderson had been serving with 82nd Airborne in Baghdis province when his unit hit some improvised explosive devices. He died of the wounds he received in the incident leaving behind his wife and nine month old daughter.

On Wednesday, I thought I’d have a play with Kurrently, a new search engine for Twitter and Facebook. Naturally, I stuck in ‘Afghanistan’ to see what would come up. I was less interested in the Twitter results because we already have Twitter search and was more ‘impressed’ with the range of material that it was digging up from Facebook profiles.

Various status updates discussed members of family who were deploying soon. There was one update apparently posted by a soldier at a U.S. base in Afghanistan. And it also became clear that a number of people were posting updates about Billy Anderson offering their condolences and support to the family.

A quick Web search and some scouring of the Department of Defense website revealed that Billy Anderson’s death had not yet been released and it wasn’t until Friday 21 May that an official statement was published.

The U.S. Department of Defense takes care to inform family members of the death of their relatives before any official announcement. Sometimes there are delays because family members are on holiday or otherwise unavailable. The aim is to ensure they do not first find out about the death of a loved one in a media report.

In this case a local radio station, WJLE radio, had reported the death on their website (on a page that is no longer available) by Thursday. It is possible that by that stage most family members knew what had happened but they might not have done.

It seems to me that Facebook’s fluctuating privacy policy combined with the power of a search engine like Kurrently has some profound consequences.

In an instant information age militaries need to work as quickly as possible to provide reliable information and might even have to ask families and friends of military casualties not to post updates on Facebook until everyone who needs to be has been informed.

Journalists are going to have to think about how they use information they access and whether it is ethically responsible to re-distribute what they find.

I, for example, could have flagged this up before the official statement but for obvious reasons – at least to me – decided not to. But that call might be more difficult in other circumstances when it could be argued that a piece of information is already in the public domain.

Perhaps most evidently it appears that Facebook is in serious danger of making its users learn how the website’s privacy settings work in some very hard ways.

P.S. And on a related note, The Toronto Star is reporting that earlier today the Helmand blog, run by UK Forces Media Operations, had to pull a blog post which allegedly revealed incorrect information about ISAF casualties at Kandahar airfield.

But one of my colleagues at the War Studies Department, Jack McDonald, has beaten me to it. While not representing my own views, he does raise many of the issues I have been thinking about. 

Here is an extract I found particularly thought-provoking:

"We live in societies that expect to be able to understand events, but it also appears that we expect perfection in warfighting. And the problem is that both the military and the press tend to feed this expectation.

The complete footage is jarring because it challenges our cultural assumptions and depictions of conflict. In a sense, this is rather like the paradox Schrödinger’s cat. We are fed stories of soldiers killing other soldiers, or soldiers killing civilians, but it is rare that we are told that soldiers sometimes shoot at people who could be either, but “we didn’t know at the time of firing”.

The people dying in the footage, with the exception of the man holding the RPG, and the two photographers who were assumed to be holding AK’s, were neither insurgents nor civilians when the trigger was pulled.

There is a plausible enough argument that the information fed to the pilots at the time made them consider that they were insurgents, but the evidence from the footage itself is wholly inconclusive. In hindsight, they are discovered to be civilians, possible insurgents and children, all classifications that we require socially in order to make value judgments on their death.

But at the point of dying they were all and none of those things to the military personnel killing them: they were just people, and in war people die. I think that is what is so uncomfortable about watching this footage. It is one thing to be told that mistakes happen, that civilians get confused for soldiers, but it is another to be confronted with the fact that soldiers have to kill people because they don’t know either way, and they can’t take the chance of not shooting."

Read the full post and discussion at Kings of War. (And just on that last point, David Betz comments on the blog that exercising courageous restraint and not shooting has been part of counter insurgency thinking).

Further Reading:

Here are some bookmarks I picked out on the incident:

1. George Packer: Interesting Times: the Truth but not the Whole Truth

2. Democracy Now speaks to journalists who were on the scene the day after the attack.

3. Al-Jazeera English: Iraq outrage over US killing video

4. The Jawa Report: Case Closed: Weapons Clearly Seen on Video of Reuters Reporters Killed in Iraq.

1. Leveraging New Media (pdf):

A US military report on the Israeli Defence Force’s use of new media in the conflict in Gaza re-published in the Australian Army Journal. It’s from the middle of 2009 but I’d not picked it up before.

It’s authored by Lieutenant General William B Caldwell IV, US Army, Mr Dennis M Murphy, and Mr Anton Menning. Not a particularly surprising conclusion if you keep track of Caldwell’s thinking:

"As the media environment continues to fragment in the future, engaging ever diversifying platforms and channels will become more difficult for the military. But, as General Creighton Abrams reputedly once said, ‘If you don’t blow your own horn, someone will turn it into a funnel.’ Under conditions of the current new media blitz, his possibly apocryphal words might be paraphrased to say, ‘If you don’t engage, someone else will fill the void.’

Surrendering the information environment to the adversary is not a practical option. Therefore, the military must seriously consider where information and the new media lie in relationship to conventional warfighting functions. One thing seems sure: we must elevate information in doctrinal importance, and adequately fund and staff organizations dealing with information."

2. Al Qaeda Central and the Internet

A new report by Daniel Kimmage claims Al Qaeda is "today primarily a media phenomenon" but that it faces "grave challenges".

3. The myth of American newspapers supporting the Iraq war

Greg Mitchell argues that at least by the eve of the invasion US newspaper editorials were reflecting serious concerns about the war in Iraq. (Too little, too late?):

"Of the forty-four papers publishing editorials about the war, roughly one-third reiterated strong support for the White House, one-third repeated their abiding opposition to it and the rest–with further debate now useless–took a more philosophical approach"

4. Of Mice and Bureaucrats: NATO, Afghanistan, war reporting and the truth

An insight into the story behind the story of the reporting of an alleged NATO ‘cover up’ of civilian casualties which NATO denies. There is more here by the journalist who believes he was being lied to. 

The announcement by the Department of Defense is the first time a single policy has been used across all branches of the Armed Forces and effectively reverses a Marine Corps ban on access last August. 

Speaking to a Bloggers Round Table yesterday, Price Floyd, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, said he encouraged serving soldiers to open up a Facebook page or a Twitter account. He also wanted to see more blogging from the front lines. 

Floyd described the formation of the new policy as a learning process (a diplomatic way of saying he faced some opposition as revealed by a fellow social media advocate) that took six or seven months. Floyd believed further cultural change was necessary particularly within the middle ranks of the Armed Forces.

While the default position might be switched to ‘open’, the policy still allows for "temporary" blocks on access.  

Concerns were raised on the Bloggers Round Table about maintaining Operational Security (OPSEC). Floyd said social media was "not an OPSEC free zone" and that OPSEC concerns essentially hadn’t changed, before rather paradoxically adding that they had become more important.

He urged those in uniform not to say anything you wouldn’t say in front of your boss or your grandma and reminded them that the potential impact of these sites is so much greater than a letter or a telephone call.

Floyd also addressed concerns about available bandwidth, often cited in the past as a reason why certain websites cannot be accessed. He acknowledged that this was still an issue:

"This policy does not add bandwidth. It might add to the strain on the existing bandwidth…in places like Afghanistan that’s a struggle."

This was a point taken up by one of the commenters on the DoD’s Roundtable blog who claimed that since the policy has been in place 15% of the bandwidth from the Combined Joint Operations Area has been going to Facebook.

We’ll have to wait and see what other changes the policy will bring about in practice. In the meantime we can expect further guidance on the Department of Defense’s Memorandum on social media to be published in 180 days.